Michael Callen is assistant professor of economics and strategic management at the Rady School of Management at the University of California in San Diego. Prior to this, he has been assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. His recent work uses experiments to identify ways to address accountability and service delivery failures in the public sector. He has published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the British Journal of Political Science. He is an Affiliate of Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD), the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), the Jameel-Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), the Center for Economic Research Pakistan (CERP), and a Principal Investigator on the Building Capacity for the Use of Research Evidence (BCURE): Data and evidence for smart policy design project. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of California San Diego and his B.Sc. at the London School of Economics. His primary interests are political economy, development economics, and experimental economics.

There has been a surge in policy research globally over the past two decades that is geared to promote evidence-based policymaking. But can policymakers put this evidence to use? Based on a survey of civil servants in India and Pakistan, this column finds that simply presenting evidence to policymakers doesn’t necessarily improve their decision-making.
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Recent findings in development economics indicate that microloans are likely to perform best when accompanied by financial education, insurance, and savings products. This column presents evidence from an experiment in Sri Lanka, which involved offering saving accounts with door-to-door deposit collection services to otherwise unbanked rural households. It suggests that the programme incentivised participants to increase savings by increasing their income.
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